The concept is sick, simple, brilliant

Selected Reviews

‘Game simmers and stews on many levels: it’s about the housing crisis, but it’s also about class war, about the growing unkindness in our society, about reality TV and about how all these things form a vicious circle feeding into each other. ‘

‘An ingeniously executed evening… it will stay in the mind as an extreme vision whose most unnerving message (not a new one) is that computer games could encourage the seeing of people as cyphers and of death as a sport.’

‘The concept is sick, simple, brilliant. The execution is all-important, and it’s handled here with exemplary finesse by the director and design team of Sacha Wares and Miriam Buether. The Almeida auditorium has been drastically remodelled: the audience, parcelled into four groups of spectators, take their pews in dark, camouflage-draped “hides”, viewing the action via TV monitors with direct sight into the mocked-up, two-floor living space also granted by rising and falling shutters. Headphones relay voice-simulated instructions and live-feed dialogue.’

‘Sacha Wares’s production, Miriam Buether’s set and Leo Warner’s video design display immense skill in synchronising all the play’s ingredients. Jodie McNee and Mike Noble also capture the pathos of a young couple whose instinctual love and affection is turned into mercenary target practice, and Kevin Harvey as the warden in charge of the shooting effectively reveals a growing social conscience. It is all done with fiendish cleverness.’